Anticipating September 2026 BARMM polls (1)
COTABATO CITY—Earlier, I wrote about the first-ever parliamentary elections in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) that were expected to happen on Oct. 13, 2025, as envisioned after they were postponed at least three times. (See “A Reality by March 2026?,” 12/30/2025 and 1/6/2026.)
No Bangsamoro parliamentary elections (BPE) happened in October 2025. The Supreme Court ruled that the electoral law the BARMM interim parliament—the Bangsamoro Transition Authority (BTA)—passed was “unconstitutional and violated Philippine national electoral laws.” It also violated some provisions of the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) approved by former President Rodrigo Duterte in 2018 as Republic Act No. 11054, and ratified by BARMM constituents in early 2019.
Considering the significant number of lawyers within the BTA, I found it hard to understand why this happened. I surmised that one probable reason for passing a faulty and noncompliant Bangsamoro electoral law was the prevailing desire of many BTA members to continue serving as appointive officials without any accountability to the region’s constituents.
I could be wrong.
But for many observers of the fledgling region, the pecuniary desire of appointive officials, especially the BTA members, has been palpable. Such desire has been the topic of long conversations about BTA’s lackadaisical performance as a whole. Observers of the region also think that this level of performance reflects some of BTA’s influential members’ desire for longevity in their positions and the entitlements and perks that go with it. Certainly, this is not true of some members who have shown conscientiousness and strong commitment to doing the best they can as regional legislators.
The BTA was tasked to pass seven priority codes at its inception until the first time frame of the extended transition period, which was May 2025. By June of that year, it was struggling to pass several codes, but still had not passed a very important one—the Bangsamoro Revenue Code. BTA Bill No. 286, or the proposal to enact a regional revenue code, was filed as early as 2024 and submitted for first reading in the same year. As of this writing, it is still scheduled for second reading.
The BTA also had to craft a new law requiring them to distribute Sulu’s electoral districts to the newly created Special Geographic Area (SGA). Sulu exited from the BARMM in September of 2024, per a Supreme Court ruling.
The SGA is composed of seven newly created municipalities out of the 63 barangays that used to belong to several municipalities in the province of (North) Cotabato. Cotabato is not a component province of the BARMM. In the plebiscite of 2019, these 63 barangays voted yes to their inclusion in the BARMM.
Instead of October 2025, the new “expected” date of the first BPE was the end of March 2026. Again, no elections happened last month.
But on March 25, 2026, President Marcos signed RA 12317, which resets the first BPE to Sept. 14, 2026. This rescheduling of the first parliamentary elections in the region is the fourth postponement.
By signing RA 12317, Mr. Marcos has amended the BOL provision that sets the regional polls in 2025. This means that the winners in the September 2026 elections will serve until 2031. The next regional elections will be synchronized with the national elections in May of 2031.
With the resetting of the regional polls and amid the deep divisions within the top leadership in the region, many constituents are still wary that another unpredictable game-changer can mar the September polls in the region as stipulated in RA 12317.
Already, several violent incidents in different localities took place last week. Among these was an ambush in Shariff Aguak, Maguindanao del Sur, that killed five police officers; another similar incident in Saguiaran, Lanao del Sur and others that are still being verified.
These incidents have triggered heated online conversations, stemming from an analysis that puts the blame for these incidents mainly on the weaknesses of the leadership of the region. In particular, such weaknesses are attributed to those of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which has been granted the reins of government leadership through the BOL.
Truly, the MILF is not a passive party in the forging of peace in the region. Its leadership has also been granted the power to run the newly forged BARMM starting in 2019. But for all its weaknesses, the MILF, as the new government leaders of the region, does not have the police power to control the levels of violence, much less now that it is no longer fighting its struggle for self-determination via the violent route.
(To be continued next week.)
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